Tagged: south-korea

Responding to a situation like the I-78 crash is nothing anyone can be ready for. That s why first responders at Lebanon Emergency Management Agency have plans in place so they can deal with any type of crisis the best they can. You just have to remember you need to get help there and remain calm, and just remember your basic steps, Jeremy Leffler, shift supervisor at LEMA, said.

But no one could have prepared him for the calls that came in Saturday. We just kept dealing with incoming phone calls and incoming phone calls. We knew it was the real deal, Leffler said.

Sometimes people exaggerate. They re emotional, they re quite upset, so they exaggerate the numbers a little bit. But then when a bunch of callers say the same thing.

you start to believe it, Leffler said. LEMA was bombarded by calls. EMS was constantly requesting help in the field.

73 people were transported to hospitals. Surrounding counties pumping 30 agencies to help out. Everyday is the unknown for these people, Eric Fahler, LEMA communications supervisor, said.

Dispatchers are trained to deal with almost every kind of scenario. But every scenario is different. And yesterday it was just a lot of skill, a lot of experience that fit into a very very good outcome.

Understanding distance is a must. They are calculating response times and coordinating from behind the screen. But the biggest obstacle on any day is the unknown.

You re never going to be prepared until you fully get there and see what you have and without those first responders out there yesterday, we couldn t have done it without them either, Fahler said. If you call 911, dispatchers ask you stay on the phone, even if it s still ringing. Otherwise they have to call you back until they get an answer because they treat every call like an emergency.

A penny just got a little cheaper. Making it, that is. While the billions of new U.S.

pennies put into circulation every year still cost more to make than they are worth, the government is catching a break from the collapse in metals prices. Each one-cent coin — made almost entirely of zinc — cost 1.43 cent to produce last year, down 14 percent from a year earlier and the lowest since 2008, according to data from the U.S. Mint.

As recently as 2011, the price tag was 2.41 cents. Since then,… Read the story on The Columbus Dispatch 1 .

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) For North Korea s propaganda machine, the long-range rocket launch Sunday carved a glorious trail of fascinating vapor through the clear blue sky. For South Korea s president, and other world leaders, it was a banned test of dangerous ballistic missile technology and yet another intolerable provocation. The rocket was launched from North Korea s west coast only two hours after an eight-day launch window opened Sunday morning, its path tracked separately by the United States, Japan and South Korea.

No damage from debris was reported. North Korea, which calls its launches part of a peaceful space program, said it had successfully put a new Earth observation satellite, the Kwangmyongsong 4, or Shining Star 4, into orbit less than 10 minutes after liftoff. It vowed more such launches.

A U.S. official said it might take days to assess whether the launch was a success. The launch follows North Korea s widely disputed claim last month to have tested a hydrogen bomb.

Washington and its allies will consider the rocket launch a further provocation and push for more tough sanctions. The United States and Japan quickly requested an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, saying Pyongyang violated a council ban on ballistic missile launches.

A Security Council meeting was scheduled for Sunday morning in New York. North Korean rocket and nuclear tests are seen as crucial steps toward the North s ultimate goal of a nuclear armed missile that could hit the U.S. mainland.

North Korea under leader Kim Jong Un has pledged to bolster its nuclear arsenal unless Washington scraps what Pyongyang calls a hostile policy meant to collapse Kim s government. Diplomats are also pushing to tighten U.N. sanctions because of the North s Jan.

6 nuclear test. In a development that will worry both Pyongyang and Beijing, a senior South Korean Defense Ministry official, Yoo Jeh Seung, told reporters that Seoul and Washington have agreed to begin talks on a possible deployment of the THADD missile defense system in South Korea. North Korea has long decried the 28,500 U.S.

troops stationed in South Korea, and Beijing would see a South Korean deployment of THAAD, which is one of the world s most advanced missile defense systems, as a threat to its interests in the region. In a statement, North Korea s National Aerospace Development Administration, in typical propaganda-laden language, praised the fascinating vapor of Juche satellite trailing in the clear and blue sky in spring of February on the threshold of the Day of the Shining Star. Juche is a North Korean philosophy focusing on self-reliance; the Day of the Shining Star refers to the Feb.

16 birthday of former dictator Kim Jong Il. North Korea has previously staged rocket launches to mark important anniversaries. South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Moon Sang Gyun said a South Korean Aegis-equipped destroyer detected the North Korean launch at 9:31 a.m.

The rocket s first stage fell off North Korea s west coast at 9:32 a.m., and the rocket disappeared from South Korean radars at 9:36 a.m. off the southwestern coast. There was no reported damage in South Korea.

The U.S. Strategic Command issued a statement saying that it detected and tracked a missile launched on a southern trajectory, but that it did not pose a threat to the United States or its allies. Japanese broadcaster NHK showed video of an object visible in the skies from the southern Japanese island of Okinawa that was believed to be the rocket.

South Korea s Yonhap news agency later backed away, without elaborating, from a report that said the rocket might have failed. The global condemnation began almost immediately. South Korean President Park Geun-hye called the launch an intolerable provocation.

She said the North s efforts to advance its missile capabilities were all about maintaining the regime in Pyongyang and criticized the North Korean leadership for ignoring the hardships of ordinary North Koreans. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed to take action to totally protect the safety and well-being of our people. U.S.

National Security Adviser Susan Rice called the North s missile and nuclear weapons programs a serious threats to our interests including the security of some of our closest allies. The Foreign Ministry in China, the North s only major ally and its protector in the U.N. Security Council, where Beijing wields veto power, expressed regret that, disregarding the opposition from the international community, the (North) side obstinately insisted in carrying out a launch by using ballistic missile technologies.

South Korean opposition lawmaker Shin Kyung-min, who attended a closed-door briefing by the National Intelligence Service following Sunday s launch, said the NIS believes that the rocket s payload satellite was about twice as heavy as the 100-kilogram (220-pound) satellite it launched in 2012. The NIS estimates that if the rocket would have been used as a missile, it would have had a potential range of about 5,500 kilometers (3,417 miles), Shin said. Kim Jong Un has overseen two of the North s four nuclear tests and three long-range rocket launches since taking over after the death of his father, dictator Kim Jong Il, in late 2011.

The U.N. Security Council prohibits North Korea from nuclear and ballistic missile activity. Experts say that ballistic missiles and rockets in satellite launches share similar bodies, engines and other technology.

If North Korea has only nuclear weapons, that s not that intimidating. If they have only rockets, that s not that intimidating, either. But if they have both of them, that means they can attack any target on Earth.

So it becomes a global issue, said Kwon Sejin, a professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. In 2013, North Korea conducted a nuclear test and then unnerved the international community by orchestrating an escalating campaign of bombast, including threats to fire nuclear missiles at the U.S. and Seoul.

North Korea has spent decades trying to develop operational nuclear weapons. It has said that plutonium and highly enriched uranium facilities at its main Nyongbyon nuclear complex are in operation. The North is thought to have a small arsenal of crude atomic bombs and an impressive array of short- and medium-range missiles.

But it has yet to demonstrate that it can produce nuclear bombs small enough to place on a missile, or missiles that can reliably deliver its bombs to faraway targets. After several failures testing a multistage, long-range rocket, it put its first satellite into space with a long-range rocket launched in December 2012. The North s recent activity comes amid a long-standing diplomatic stalemate.

Six-nation negotiations on dismantling North Korea s nuclear program in exchange for aid fell apart in early 2009. ___ Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim and Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul; Yuri Kageyama and Eric Talmadge in Tokyo; Lolita Baldor in Washington; Louise Watt in Beijing; and Edith Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report. Like this: Like Loading… WTNH NEWS8 provides commenting to allow for constructive discussion on the stories we cover.

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